It is relatively easy for me to talk about the birth of Jesus as a mythological event that you and I can actually experience. My brief but intense study of James Hillman – especially The Thought of the Heart – prepared me well.
It was Hillman who taught me that: “the thought of the heart is the thought of images, that the heart is the seat of imagination, that imagination is the authentic voice of the heart, so that if we speak from the heart we must speak imaginatively.”
Imagine our journey guided by a single star, imagine the stable in which a poor woman gives birth, imagine the baby squalling in the manger, imagine . . .
But Kimberley reminds me though that before the heart concocted that comforting narrative it was grappling with a much deeper one: solstice, the season of darkness and going without. In Circles and Lines, John Demos suggests that winter was an existential crisis in New England. Food was sparse, light less frequent, the cold potentialy fatal. For them, the Advent journey reflected intimacy with our inherent frailty and the inevitability of the grave.
Kimberley calls it a time to “be hidden” but not – so far as I understand her – in a shameful way or a maybe-the-crisis-won’t-find-us way so much as a nurturing way, a resting way, a grounding way.
It is here in the darkened quiet that stillness dissolves us and helps us to escape the busyness of our sleep-walking life. In the interior silence, we know what we are and what everything is for. In quiet communion with God and with every particle of Love, we hear the notes of heaven rise and fall and we become the song.
I’m currently re-reading Carolyn Sawicki’s Seeing the Lord for the third time since it arrived in late October. The book is literally falling apart in my hands. Sawicki’s thesis is that the work in no trivial way is simply to listen to women – let women demonstrate agape love, let women establish the communal rule, let women show you how to follow Jesus now.
Margaret talking about spiritual doulas, Valentine the drudgery of chores, Sawicki patiently reframing the Jesus project in terms of competencies, learning ways to live together in peace and justice, which she believes are fundamentally female . . .
The Holy Spirit murmuring, let me have the appearance of gender difference, and the distribution of power attached to it, and I will heal you with it . . .
As I write, a bright sun rises off hills bisected by the river and Route Nine. Juncos pick through the crumbs where yesterday I ate a bagel outside. The snow has held for three days. We have to move a few hundred pounds of gravel to the run-in but mostly our outdoor chores are over. A kind of hunkering down energy appears in our living and we lean into it together, as a family.
Amanda’s beautiful witness to loving the inner child and Donna’s “the one thing that colored the entire day with muddy colors was really nothing more than my frame of mind” have unsettled me.
I’ll have to look at that today.
What I want is a chill Advent, and a chiller Christmas, and then smooth sailing until Easter and the summer solstice. But the invitation being extended through the communal sharing is, go slower. The invitation is, be still.
Yesterday I wrote “I’m going nowhere.” This morning, all I want to do is run away.
Sharing from your heart helps me “rest deeply”, there is a relaxing into my humanness and beyond. 🙏 Truly inspiring . ♥️
Thank you Glenda – I appreciate that. Trying to find my way to a new space that your phrase “relaxing into my humanness and beyond” perfectly captures. Thank you for framing it that way and for just generally being a light in the darkness. I’m very grateful 🙏🙏
~ Sean
I am almost at a loss for words dear Sean. Thank you for making this journey so personal, not only in how you share about yourself, but also that you make it a journey together., The way you take us with you in your article is so warm and wonderful. it now really DOES feel we are all drinking coffee with you and talking about God. I had similar feelings as you did today. I felt overwhelmed and stuck. I have written about it in my Substack post: https://valentinelaout.substack.com/p/the-river-overflowing-its-banks
It is the result of my journaling today and I wanted to share.
Looking forward to journaling tomorrow and to your post here. Much love to you, 💖 Valentine
Thank you Valentine – I am looking forward (I always look forward) to reading you. We are in this together 🙏🙏
~ Sean
I read for the first time just the other day How is judgement relinquished? … I keep going back, re reading it feels like a long exhale … I love it and it feels so right and good and true, doable even, and then I fall back into an automatic judging/thinking system of what I want “means” or is equal to what’s best for me.
I especially love this part – His sense of care is gone, for he has none. He had given it away, along with his judgement.
Wow, I find that awe inspiring … that my sense of care can be gone …that my care isn’t required, there’s no need for it, the care arose with the judgement and leaves with it, what a gift.
Thank you, Amanda. And thank you for referencing that powerful section from the Manual. One thing I am looking forward to in 2025 is writing more about the Manual – it has been a good guide over the past year – and, in a lot of ways, heals some of the stuff in the Text and Workbook that I think is confused and not fully developed.
But yes – the idea that we can let go of judgment – is SO radical. When we really look at it, it seems kind of dangerous and poorly thought out. But I think it’s right there at the heart of the practice of noticing ego – ego IS judgment. If we’re going to go without ego, we’re going to have to go without that high stakes, highly personal sense of responsibility for navigating the world and relationship in ways informed by “judgment” – whether we call it common sense, intuition, culture, the law or whatever.
Thank you for sharing and being here 🙏🙏
~ Sean
You’re a small paragraph about the Holy Spirit healing my confusion about gender differences, thank you for that.
You’re welcome, Rebecca. Women are my teachers in this life, with one or two exceptions.
~ Sean
Wonderful, Sean. I’m playing catch-up in my reading, so I have the benefit of yesterday’s events that inform my comment here today. You said, “the invitation being extended through the communal sharing is, go slower. The invitation is, be still.” I’m always for that, though not always practicing that. With this journaling exercise, there is now some stillness before, during, and after the journaling. As I told my husband this morning, be prepared for the stuff that rises up as I examine addiction to grievance and choosing again. So, yeah, I understand the run away part. (I suspect my husband will understand it soon enough, too. 😉🙂❤️)
There really needs to be a support group for spouses of ACIM students. And honestly? I’d love to a fly on the wall for one of their meetings. I’m sure I’d learn a lot 🙂
Yes, the intentional writing works that way for me as well – language is a living system (using us as much as we use it) and there is something about willfully and consensually entering that flow – that livingness – that is deeply healing by basically purifying me. A lot of my stuff comes up and – if I can keep in the light long enough (without trying to fix it, poeticize it, deny it, project it, whatever) then it’s undone.
It’s that critical space – that few seconds right at the beginning – that gets me. I understand my spiritual ancestors whose experience of the resurrected – the healing – Jesus was symbolized by a thief in the night. We have to be ready – we have to be attentive. And as you know, it’s easier said than done.
Thanks for reading and sharing, Margaret – very grateful for your presence.
~ Sean